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Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City by William Sites (review)

2023; Saint Louis University; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/afa.2023.a903620

1945-6182

T. R. Johnson,

Digital Games and Media

Reviewed by: Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City by William Sites T. R. Johnson William Sites. Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2020. 321 pp. $30.00. Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City by William Sites is an excellent interdisciplinary study that, like Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006) by Thomas Brothers, situates an iconic musical figure in the thickest possible contexts. Unlike John Szwed’s useful Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (2000), Sites’s book does not purport to introduce the uninitiated to Ra’s full life-story and artistic achievement; rather, it leads those with at least a surface grasp of this territory into far deeper details regarding the precise cultural forces—musical, rhetorical, political, philosophic, and economic—that coalesced around Ra to launch his extraordinary career. When Sun Ra first arrived in Chicago in the immediate aftermath of World War II, his name was Herman Blount, a relatively conventional musician who worked a variety of ordinary jobs for someone with his particular skills and background. But by the time he left Chicago some fifteen years later, he had changed his name, his Arkestra had begun to perform wearing “outer space” regalia, and his life and work were suffused with the rhetoric of what would come to be called Afrofuturism. Sites’s book details this transformation by contextualizing it in ways that will be of great value not only to those interested in avant-garde jazz but also to historians of the urban United States, theorists of Black liberation movements, scholars of the roots of Afrofuturism, and, most pointedly, anyone curious about the cultural and social life of the South Side of Chicago in the middle decades of the twentieth century—a world that would be profoundly formative for African American identity and creativity, nationally, in the decades that followed. Sites’s book answers two primary questions: How did Sun Ra’s music and cosmology emerge, and why did they flourish in Chicago? The answer he develops over the course of the book significantly complicates standard histories of music in Chicago and, more broadly, of Black cultural activity in that city. The answer actually begins in Birmingham, where Ra spent his early years, a city that, as Sites notes, would prepare him for what he would find—and what he would do—during his fifteen years in postwar Chicago. In Birmingham, Ra lived near a Masonic temple as [End Page 139] well as near a grand hall of the Knights of Pythias, both of which likely gave him a taste for esoteric knowledge and an awareness of the power of fraternal organizations. Both in turn shaped what he would create with the Arkestra. In Birmingham, he was a student at Industrial, then the largest all-Black high school in the United States, where music education was a great point of pride. But perhaps even more important, the Birmingham of that period, as Sites explains, was an example of what urban historians call a “shock city”—a place where the spectacle of industrialization was so profound, so sudden in its arrival and so awe-inspiring in its scale, that it seemed to have no known antecedent; it seemed to have dropped down, that is, onto Earth out of a science-fiction movie. Sun Ra was literally at home in such terrain. When he became part of the Second Great Migration—during which African Americans fled the South in the aftermath of World War II to join communities formed a generation earlier in Chicago, Detroit, and New York—he participated in a process that differed in an important respect from that first wave: Those who moved north after World War II, as Ra did, were not fleeing remote rural towns and farms, but were coming mostly from larger cities, which meant that they underwent no period of adjustment to urban life. Moreover, as they joined the large and well-established Black communities in those cities, they were ready right away to begin to imagine what a city-within-a-city, a kind of freestanding Black utopia independent of the terrors of white...